[tablespoon]

> X is like trying to fly modern rockets with Apollo-era computers. The computers will work, until they don’t. In which case the only people able to fix them are retired and you have to salvage parts from aerospace museums. Over the years the cruft of replacement parts has accumulated and no one person can really understand the whole thing anymore, and entire sections are not understood and nobody remembers why they’re there or really what they do (but if you get too close to it the lights go off in certain important corner cases).

And often the response to that it to rewrite it in something "modern," like Electron.

I feel the appropriate response to a situation like you describe is put in the work to figure the existing thing out rather throw it away and put the work to building and debugging a replacement. It's less sexy, but it's the right thing to do.

Now it would be an entirely different matter if the old system could not longer provide adequate performance, etc. I'm only addressing the "it's old and only understood by olds, therefore replace" thought process.

[yeetaccount]

The problem is that X was created over decades for very different eras of computers and it doesn’t really make sense to keep modifying it — there are design limitations to it, and the accumulated complexity has made it unmaintainable. X maintainers have abandoned it and told people to migrate to Wayland. Sometimes you just need a clean slate.

[chousuke]

Nah, you figure it out, then throw it out and rebuild a better alternative.

X11 has had too much piled on it already; it needs to go.